Stone upon stone: an Italian sojourn: Flying too close to the sun

From the hill of the ancient archeological site, Valle dei Templi--the temples are actually on a hill, not in a valley--modern Agrigento looks like the fantasy drawing on Filippo Bentivigna's cave walls near Sciacca. From afar, it is picture postcard pretty, but up close it might take the prize for being one of the ugliest towns in Sicily so far. It most certainly is the untidiest: everywhere we drove the city was littered with plastic, newsprint, thrown away junk. Locals seem not to care, though the municipality clean up truck worked the streets, constantly, attempting to tame some of the accumulated detritus.

Rats. I worry about rats. And they caused the plague. And the roads into and out of the city, twisting up and down severe switch back levels do little to add to any feeling of comfort. Not our favourite place in all of Sicily, by a long shot.

Luckily these ruins we came to visit on the opposite hill--of yet another settlement of a yet a different group of ancient Greeks stretching back 2,500 years and further--are a lot neater and cleaner: albeit, like modern Agrigento, a tumble of broken and crumbled buildings.

And for the first time in Sicily, we find ourselves amidst a considerable number of tourists visiting this famous site. They usually find us somewhere on our jaunts. Still, there are not many today, which is great.

The port, the Agora, and the Ekklasiasterion where the citizens' assembly would have met, are spread out on the hills above the water line. Once this site was considered the most beautiful city that mortals had ever built. Even today, it is picturesque. Old Akragas, now renamed Agrigento, once thrived here, and became so huge that some of it has yet to be excavated.

Though not all of the tales are fair in the telling. One of the early settlement builders, for instance, the tyrant, Phalaris, who was responsible for some of the good things that made the settlement sound -- like contributing to the solid twelve kilometres of fortifications that were laid out as protection around the city perimeter -- could not have been a well man. Seeking a new way to torture local criminals Phalaris had his chief designer, Perilos from Athens, build a large brass bull with a door in its side and an acoustic fix to its auditory channel that converted sounds from within the beast to soothing moans from without. In this, one by one, he imprisoned, then executed, those on his hit list, by lighting a roaring fire beneath the bull, then laughing at the moans emitted from the bull's mouth.

Today we walked among the temple ruins with vast flocks of birds wheeling overhead and a strong scent of honey from bees carrying pollen from almond blossoms and wild yellow flowers that are carpeting the fields.

In small fenced fields, off the cobbled route between the dead temples, a tiny flock of an ancient breed of Girgentana goat from Afghanistan, brought to Agrigento centuries ago, are being saved from extinction by the slow food movement: the goat's milk rich in health-giving lipids and proteins. Their twisted horns and profuse long straight hair are capturing attention. Life goes on here.

The temples are Doric: simple, elegant, beautiful. Like Segesta and Selinunte, they must have been exquisite. From the water, with the sea so close, this settlement of thousands upon thousands must have looked invincible. But, again, the alliances they made did not save them in the long term. Again, the Carthaginians moved in, just a few years after they had sacked Selinunte, and Agrigento's golden years were over. Settlement continued on and off for centuries as invaders moved in and moved on. Romans left their mark, as have the Arabs.

We spent hours pouring over the finds in the archeology museum; we needed the car to move on to that area. Here, one of the largest recoveries was a telamon, a caryatid, a giant godlike colossus, some 7.6 metres tall, one of a row of many of the same figures, it is believed, that was to be erected holding up the roof of the unfinished Temple of Zeus. One photograph even theorises the positioning of all the telamon, with raised arms aloft like Atlas. What a vast extraordinary temple that would have been had it been completed.

There are other major finds: a beautiful warrior bent in a warlike pose preparing to use his shield in one hand, his spear in another: though many of the body parts are missing. This haunting statue-in-the-round might have come from the pediments of the Temple of Heracles. Stunning smashed faces of beautiful Greek youths and a vast number of temple votive offerings abound.

And there are later finds from Roman occupation of the site: a hoard of fifty-two gold Roman coins found in an unpretentious unglazed pot near the Senate buildings, buried there just as the second Punic war was starting. The owner presumably died fighting, never to return for his buried treasure. It was dug from its burial place only in 1987.

These amazing glory days come for these astonishing civilisations, and just as fast they seem to go. The great days of ancient Akragas were short-lived. Like Icarus, they flew close to the sun in their search for beauty, for perfection. Like Icarus, their wings were singed: they are tumbling still.